Meet Hoyeon Jung, Seoul Street Style Star and Korea’s Next Top Model

How do you describe a model like Hoyeon Jung? Take Hanne Gaby Odiele’s flair for street style, add the goofy selfie antics of Cara Delevingne, and you have one of Seoul’s top modeling talents, a redheaded stunner who—we’re calling it now—will be the next Korean girl to make a splash stateside.

On the runway at Charm’s last Sunday—one of 19 shows she walked this Seoul Fashion Week—you could see the difference. Where other models plodded on with a serious stare, Jung stopped, gave a cheeky smile and head flip, before turning smoothly to saunter back down the catwalk. On the street, it’s the same: Whether she’s wearing a simple black tank and corduroy mini or dressed in a colorful, statement-making Fendi fur top, she stops photographers and fans—more than 221,000 on Instagram—in their tracks with a wry grin or canny leap through the air.

Born and raised in Myeonmok-dong, a small neighborhood on the outskirts of Seoul, Jung, 22, started modeling nearly six years ago. “I thought to myself, What should I do for a living so that I can keep feeding myself?’” she says, “and I thought, Oh, I’m tall, so why not give modeling a try?” After years of working hard on her own, interviewing at castings and agencies, she cold-called ESteem Models in 2012, came in for a meeting, and was signed on the spot. Not long after that, she competed in Korea’s Next Top Model and placed second that season.

As we chat over iced Americanos and tea, Jung gestures wildly and laughs loudly—this is a girl with magnetic charm, and it’s clear why Seoul’s street style photographers all clamor to shoot her. “If I happily smile and play around and laugh ‘ha-ha, hoo-hoo, yay,’ laughing like that, I think the photo looks cooler,” she says, smiling. “If I just stand there like this”—she poses seriously—“like ‘Oh, I’m a model,’ well, I don’t think that’s what it means to be a model at all. If I show some of my personality in the photos, it looks better, don’t you think?”

As for her personal style, it's a well-edited mix of pieces that exemplifies Seoul’s current yen for youthful street fashion: A purple patterned LovLov slip dress over black cropped flares and Dr. Marten’s loafers; a shredded SJYP jean jacket with Tod’s boots. Today she’s wearing a LovLov striped robe coat and black turtleneck with wide-leg pants and Reeboks. “My signature is denim, boxy denim jackets,” she says. “I love wide and long pieces, but my agency hates it when I wear wide pants because they drown me.” And where does a Seoul street style star go shopping? Garosu-gil, of course, the tree-lined street fashion mecca, where designers like Low Classic and SJYP have stand-alone boutiques, and where Jung visits twice a month to find new rings and bangles from Monday Edition and boot-cut flares. “Ooh,” she says, sighing, “I love Lemaire, too, you know from the Uniqlo collaboration? It’s so, so my style”—she claps loudly—“bravo!”

Up next, a trip to New York in November, followed by meetings with casting agents in her first big push to go global. “Next year I want to go to New York, whether I’m modeling there or not,” Jung says. “These days, it’s not enough for models to just do shows and photo shoots anyway, you have to be making videos and finding ways to create other content—that’s what I think.” We’d say she has the right idea, and New Yorkers should certainly take note—this is one face you’ll be seeing around town soon.